


Sound

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-20
Updated: 2007-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 08:26:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1641407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Story by Imrihamun</p><p>A glimpse at a modern form of world domination.  Rating for language only.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sound

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Dreaming_Trees

 

 

A ball bearing shot across the room. Emily hadn't expected the device to eject its innards, scattering parts in the lab and leaving the laser exposed, but even if she had, she wouldn't have thought to remove the glass case in the corner. No one had noticed it in years. Now whatever it contained was oozing iridescent among the shattered glass fragments and warm machine parts.

Emily yanked a plug from the wall. A warm, horrible smell, like decomposing swamp or fraternity house sidewalk, rose from the corner of the room. She swore expertly, like only a graduate student could.

Doc Sexton's gonna kill me, she thought. She went closer, grimacing as she got closer to the stench, and nudged some of the goo with the very edge of her boot. There was nothing around the lab that looked like something to clean this up with, at least not without making it worse.

She poked her head out of the lab and looked down the hallway. Nothing but clean air. Emily locked the door behind her and gulped a few breaths before finding the storage room. She took the largest glass beaker she could find, some anti-corrosion gloves, and a pane of glass. Emily wasn't a chemist, but she knew there must have been a reason for why this stuff had been kept in glass.

She took one last deep breath in the hallway before going back into Doctor Sexton's lab. The smell had gotten worse. She opened the one window as far as she could, letting in a rush of winter air. It pierced the scent briefly before settling in as a thick, cold layer around her ankles.

Scraping the ooze into the beaker took longer than Emily had expected. There seemed to be more than the shattered case should have held. It was an old case, as the card she found nearby seemed to indicate. The card - surprisingly dry but predictably odorous - seemed to say it was from some Antarctic expeditions in the late '30s. There were some abbreviations, some coordinates that meant nothing to her, and some names she didn't know. Not physicists. Goo was not a major part of physics, at least not this kind. Plasma she understood, well, as well as anyone could, but this seemed _organic_. Organic things, according to her logic, were biological, or at the very least on the soft side of chemistry and thus not her problem anymore. She put the card next to the beaker on a side table.

Emily was propping the door open to air the room out when Doctor Sexton appeared suddenly. She purposefully chose her shoes in order to walk as quietly as possible. It was otherwise, she said, needlessly disturbing to air currents and research in general. Emily was convinced she actually did it to sneak up on everyone else in the world.

"Miss Salter! What the hell have you done to my laboratory?"

"The assemblage spring snapped and things went everywhere and I have no idea what this was," she said, pointing to the glass bits and the full beaker, "but it is old and it is really gross and it is not supposed to be here. I'm sure of it."

Doctor Sexton held the filled beaker up to the light. The iridescent substance swirled inside, forming bubbles and nodules. Emily looked up at it, watching the lava-lamp movement and trying not to breathe too deeply.

"What do you mean, 'it's old'?"

"There was a card near the glass I cleaned up. It looks like it says 1937?"

"Anything else?" They both watched as the liquid shifted. "Was it doing this before?" she added quietly.

"No. Um. The card's right here."

"Go get a china marker and mark the level." The professor put the container down again, placing one of the glass panes on top of it. She took a calibration manual from the nearest shelf and placed it above the glass.

When Emily was gone, Doctor Sexton read the card. She frowned. She'd been at the university long enough to know about this expedition. At one point she'd argued against making it part of the graduate students' orientation; they'd won, and it wasn't mentioned to any student. They could find out whatever was in the library as they liked, but it had been decided that no one needed to be told especially about the Antarctic expeditions.

They'd thought all the artifacts had been destroyed. One of the phases of the 1986-1990 Miskatonic University Security of Information Program had included inventory recall and evaluation of all the scientific collections. All the artifacts, all the collected specimens, all the custom-made lab equipment. Of course a few things must have gone missing; they always did. This must have been one of them, lain forgotten in the back of her lab.

She'd never known it was there, but if the tag was correct, it had been there seventy years now. Seventy years, twenty-five of which that this had been one of her labs. She'd failed to find it and remove it when she moved in, so the specimen was her problem now.

It was clean in the corner Emily had said she'd found it. The ooze had scraped up dry, leaving only a little moist haze where it had fallen on the ground. Doctor Sexton passed her hand over the area and found it neither wet, sticky, nor even discolored.

"You did get all of it, right?" Emily was crouched down to mark the level of the ooze in the beaker. Now that she was closer to it, she saw small nodules rise slightly from the surface of the liquid and then collapse back into it.

"I think so. The smell's going away now that it's closed up." The marker squeaked. As soon as she put it down it seemed wrong. Emily turned away. "Um. I'm really sorry."

"It's okay. I didn't know it was there."

"Do you know what it is?"

"No, not really. It's actually Geology's problem. That was a geological expedition."

Emily looked at the glistening substance. It wibbled. She frowned. "That's not a rock."

\--

The rest of the ooze slid down the outside of the physics and chemistry building and landed in a puddle around a rain gutter. It had followed the cold air. Cold felt right. The muddy water was cold and wet and fantastic. It extended itself, a thin thread, up the gutter and down the channels of water which spilled away from the building. Too long in the warm, small place had stunted it. Here in the cold, wet open it could stretch and breathe and stream outward nearly forever.

\--

The Miskatonic University Safety Commission unilaterally voted for the destruction of the artifact. Four days after its discovery, the beaker with the shoggoth sample from the ill-fated 1937 Antarctic expedition was burned in a superheated incinerator. The noise was explained as a malfunction of the town's old air-raid sirens.

When Emily asked, Doctor Sexton told her that the gel had been determined to be a geological feature that had become destabilized in years of improper storage conditions.

\--

One especially wet March day, the escaped ooze pulled all its limbs back towards its center. It had failed to grow as large as it would have in the Antarctic ocean, Massachusetts lacking precisely this climate, but was satisfied with its growth. It had observed and practiced imitating the surroundings for some time. Back when it had been in the laboratory, no one had noticed the shoggoth in the jar. It was clear and it reflected. The reflections had gone unnoticed by people in the room over the seventy years, and if anyone had paid attention to their face in the jar, they would have attributed the imprecision to the warp of the glass case, the unevenness of the glass itself.

The ooze had practiced being other surroundings for the past few months, and was largely satisfied with its ability to imitate shoes and cell-phone conversations. Neither was particularly difficult. The gutter puddle was exceptionally boring now. The shoggoth pulled itself together and began to walk.

Working on land and in the heat was difficult. It could barely stretch enough to imitate one of the lamps along the path. Imitating a passed-out fraternity brother was simpler in some ways, although the colors were still tricky. It had been good practice. Walking was interesting, though. All that cool air passing over one's surfaces, all those interesting things zooming by, and all the things to feel and hear and see.

Eventually it determined that the humans it had first imitated were not quite the dominant species.

\--

"Hey baaaaby, hey hey, come on and come on and come on meeeeeee," the shoggoth warbled through its left opening. Other organs made the other noises it had heard from the stereos. It had thirty-four other verses, most of which sounded similar. It tried a few more, changing the audio vibrations just a little.

"That was awesome," Jacob said. The shoggoth burbled. "No, seriously, this is awesome. Greg, who the fuck made this thing?"

Greg stood a few feet back from the other two. They thought it was some robotics experiment. Some gooey, wireless robotics experiment. No wonder they were liberal arts majors.

"Not us. It's a...I don't know what the hell that thing is, Jake. I don't know about it."

He turned and grinned. "Music, then? Without you?"

"Oh, come on," he said, professionally offended. "The music department here can barely handle real computers. There's no way they can..."

"I came out of a jar!" the shoggoth interrupted.

"Fuck, you can talk?" Aaron waved a hand in front of the shoggoth. It waved back.

"Fuck, I can talk."

"Great," Greg said, "you've managed to make it swear. Happy now?"

Jacob flipped him off casually. "No. Dude, what's your name?"

"Name." It sagged.

"What's your mother call you?"

Oh, the shoggoth thought. Once it parsed 'mother,' it was easy. It told them.

When he was finished, Aaron shook his head. "That's not gonna fly. You better get a DJ name."

\--

Afterword

Effective lobbying by the musical industry, coupled with surprisingly high turnout among young voters, led to the privatization of large portions of America's coastal waters. Significantly, the American portions of Lake Superior and most of the coasts of Washington and Oregon were designated private property. These regions were immediately purchased by the Watzit corporation's lawyers and now act as homes for the musician and his children.

Watzit resides in Alaska with some of his offspring. Political analysts who study the Watzit effect have issued cautionary statements to all industries in the region who may be occupying land that the Watzit corporation will likely attempt to purchase.

Watzit's latest album broke historical records in 2008 by selling over one million legitimate copies in its first week of release. Twenty-seven fatalities were confirmed in Los Angeles. Releasing the album on Halloween was decried by police organizations and religious leaders. Devil's Night fires started in Detroit by Watzit fans continued to burn into early 2009.

 


End file.
